Unlikely Magic: A Cinderella Retelling (Girl Among Wolves Book 1)

by Lena Mae Hill

  My mother does not answer him.

  As they draw closer, I note the strangeness of his eyes. The irises are a dark blue ring filled with a lighter blue, so pale it’s almost white. It’s disconcerting, especially in his warm complexion, where you’d expect brown eyes. A streak of white darts through his hair behind his ear. When our eyes meet, a teasing sparkle lights his, and something flickers inside me.

  Before I can dwell on the boy longer, an Asian girl with long, fluttering black hair bounds forward from the group, her face lit with excitement. “Is she here?” she asks, grabbing my arm.

  My mother gestures stiffly at me and says, “This is Stella.”

  The girl gasps and jerks her hand back from me like she’s been electrocuted. She stumbles against the odd boy, who steadies her and mutters something about Diana. A black girl with smooth brown skin and corkscrew curls makes a sign that I don’t recognize, circling her palm above her heart. From the way her eyes are so wide I can see the whites all around, it could be a sign to ward off evil, like crossing yourself. The nerdy-looking guy holds onto her arm like he might faint.

  I glance at my mother for an explanation, but she stares straight ahead, her mouth a tight, white line. The last boy in the group, a stocky Mexican with one arm that ends at the elbow and a scar across his neck that makes me shiver, whispers, “She’s Amira.”

  “She’s not like us,” my mother snaps as she bends to snatch the handle of one of my suitcases from my hand. She barrels forward, knocking her shoulder against the nerdy boy so hard he stumbles into the black girl, who stumbles against the tall boy. My mother barks at me to follow, so I take a step forward, and the entire group recoils as I pass.

  It’s not my mother. It’s me.

  I want to touch my face, to make sure I’m not covered in sores that I’ve been too busy crying to notice. Dr. Golden never said leprosy was an aftereffect of the accident. But she also never said it wasn’t.

  I jog to catch up with my mother, who has turned onto a downward sloping path leading off the main one to the right. This one is worn less than the main trail, covered with old leaves and shaded by big trees. It flattens out in front of another old log cabin. My mother drops my suitcase on the ground at the foot of the four wooden steps before stomping into the house. The screen door swings shut behind her, but at least she doesn’t slam the inner door in my face.

  Still too stunned to absorb everything that’s happened in the past hour, I pick up the suitcases and drag them up the steps. I have to hold the screen door open with my knee while I wrangle my two suitcases inside. If they didn’t have wheels, I’d still be out on the road where the cab driver left me. I haven’t yet decided if that would be a good thing.

  The house looks bigger inside than outside. A large open room takes up most of the space inside, with an area in the back corner blocked off by a wall. I can hear my mother banging around in there and know that’s the kitchen. The house is warm, so I peel off my jacket, relieved for a moment of solitude. Then a door upstairs swings open, and a set of feet appear on the wooden stairs, followed by the rest of the girl, who looks a little younger than me.

  “Mother?” she calls.

  Suddenly, I don’t just have a mother I never knew existed. I have a sister. She stops when she sees me and sinks back on the stairs, her hand flying to her mouth, her eyes wide. I discretely pat my cheek for festering wounds. My skin is as smooth and soft as ever. What the hell is going on?

  The screen door bangs behind me, and I jump a mile and spin around. This time, I’m the one whose mouth drops open. I’m the one who’s speechless. Because standing in front of me is…me.

  3

  For a second, I’m so disconnected by everything that’s happened recently, that I have to blink a few times to make sure I’m not looking into a mirror. In front of me is a heart shaped face framed by soft white waves. A small nose, high cheekbones, and wideset eyes with long, pale lashes. Before this week, before today, I don’t know if I’ve ever gone out in public without coating mine with mascara.

  The girl gasps, her bow-shaped pink lips parting and her golden eyes widening. She makes that same sign the black girl made outside—a circle over her chest with her palm. Then her hand falls on her heart.

  “That’s enough, girls,” my mother says, stomping out of the kitchen. “You knew your sister was coming. Stella, these are your sisters, Elidi and Zora.”

  I lift my fingers in a tiny wave. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” says Elidi—not just my sister, but my twin. My identical twin. We even have the same haircut, side bangs and hair a little past the shoulders. The only difference right now is what we’re wearing. If we switched clothes, we would be interchangeable even to our parents.

  On the heels of that thought, I wonder if they have a new father. A stepfather. Or maybe Zora has a real one. She looks nothing like me, with her short dark hair and ruddy, acne-strewn complexion. But I recognize the same expression on her face that all the other wore—shock and disgust and wariness.

  I wonder if they look at Elidi that way. If she’s a freak and since I look like her, I am, too. And then I remember the boy with the strange eyes singing out her name, and I know she’s not a freak. I just don’t know why I am.

  I shuffle my feet, unable to endure the hostile stares another moment. Red dust coats the toes of my boots. I keep my eyes fixed there as my mother says, “Let’s get you up to your room. You must be tired after all that travel. You can get settled in.” She does not say this in a warm, welcoming way, but rather like she’s a robot reading lines off a script.

  It’s a relief to get away. I only hope I’m not sharing Zora’s room, although it might explain her resentment.

  No one offers to help with my suitcases, so I grab the handles and start for the stairs. Zora jumps up and retreats to the small landing above when I approach.

  “It isn’t much,” Mother says. “But it’s what we have. I wasn’t expecting a sudden guest. If you spend a little time cleaning it up, it will do you just fine.”

  “Okay,” I say, heaving my bags up another step. “Thanks.”

  “If you’re going to live here, I expect you to do chores around the house, same as your sisters do,” she continues, as if I never spoke. “Getting your room cleaned up to my standards will be your first one. You’ll want to do that anyway, to make it comfortable for you. It seems this is going to be your home now.”

  I stagger up another two steps, panting out another thanks. And then we’re at the top. Zora steps back into the doorway of the room on the right. Behind her, I glimpse a small bedroom, the bed neatly made up with a white quilt edged in blue flowers. My mother is rattling the old doorknob to the left, muttering when she finds it locked. She searches the pockets of her voluminous skirt, pulls out a key ring, and unlocks the rusted, loose knob. When she pushes open the door, I stand there gaping.

  It’s bigger than Zora’s little room, taking up the remainder of the upper floor, but it’s not huge. It’s under the slanted eves, tall in the middle but too short at the edges for someone to stand upright under the roof. Every inch of it is piled with crap.

  Boxes upon dusty boxes, old furniture covered in sheets, a pile of lumber, lamps, a broken rocking chair, and a hundred more items I can’t inventory in one glance.

  “Wait, what? Are you serious?” I ask, turning to my mother.

  “You think you’re too good for us?” she snaps. “This is what we have. I never thought you’d show up asking for a handout. Your father agreed to take you on.”

  I swallow hard, fighting back the words that want to spill forth—that he never treated me like a burden he had to take on. Despite my best efforts, my voice breaks when I speak. “It’s not like he meant to die.”

  “No, I guess not,” she says, frowning and rubbing her temple. The smell of the room, like cat pee and mold, makes my head ache. Pale autumn light filters sluggishly through a skylight that’s covered in rotting leaves that must’ve been there since last fal
l. Another window, at the far end of the room, seems miles away, over the endless mountain of trash.

  I suddenly want to turn around and bolt from the room, from the house, back to where life made sense. Back to last week.

  “There’s a sofa bed in here somewhere,” Mother mutters, clomping into the room and picking up a couple of lamps and a vacuum cleaner off a piece of furniture shrouded in its creepy white veil. She whips off the white sheet with a flourish.

  “Here it is,” she says with a grand gesture, smiling as if offering me the moon. Dust motes drift down around her like snowflakes, disturbed from their home on the sheet she so unceremoniously yanked from under them. “You can sleep here. The rest will take a little work, but you can get it cleaned up if you stop putting on airs like you’re too good for all this. I won’t lie to you, Stella. You’ve grown up a spoiled child in the big city, but life is harder out here. If you’re willing to put in some hard work, you’ll do fine. Otherwise…” She shrugs and leaves that up to my imagination. I remember again the solid wall of forest that seemed to bulge inwards towards us, pulsing hungrily as we passed, and the giant cougar slinking towards me.

  “It—it’s fine.” My voice comes out thin and reedy.

  “Great,” Mother says. “If there’s anything you need, let us know. I’m sure you’re still grieving, and you’ll need some time alone to process. One of us will be just downstairs whenever you call.” With that, she gives me a magnanimous smile and strides from the room in her sturdy boots, shutting the door behind her.

  I sink down onto the couch and just sit there, staring at the door. At any moment, it will burst open and Emmy will come bounding through, laughing at my expression, telling me this whole thing is her most elaborate prank yet. Instead, I feel the vibrations of people walking around in the house below, hear the thud of Mother’s boots. Wood clattering into a box. The fire roaring below the chimney, a stainless-steel tube that runs right through my room. It’s warm up here, too warm. The dust and weird smells in the dry air make my nose run and my eyes water.

  At least that’s what I tell myself.

  4

  I wake when the door creaks open. I sit up fast, not wanting them to know I was sleeping. Not after all the spoiled and lazy comments my mother made earlier. As soon as I’m upright, I wish I’d slept a little longer. If I was still asleep, I wouldn’t be here in this smelly attic where I can’t breathe, with a weird family I don’t know. I’d be at home, in my bed, in the little two-bedroom house with the siding that needed to be replaced. Dad would be alive, and I could call Emmy and talk to her for hours while we looked at magazines or watched TV or tried on makeup.

  “Mother told me to bring you dinner,” Elidi whispers, creeping into the room like she’s afraid I’m going to attack her. She glances around nervously, searching for a place to set down the tray she carries. Every single thing in this attic—or room, or whatever it is—is covered in crap, though, so she just stands there, shifting from one foot to the other.

  I’m about to say I don’t want her stupid charity food, but my stomach wakes up at the smell of onions and growls loud enough to echo around the room, betraying me. Elidi’s mouth twitches.

  “Sorry,” I mutter, pressing my hand to my belly. Ever since Dad died, I’ve had no desire to eat, but my body doesn’t care. It wants to eat, even when I don’t.

  “It’s okay,” she whispers, glancing at the door behind her.

  Before she can leave I blurt out, “Did you know about me?”

  She shakes her head, her eyes going wide. “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” She seems to relax, crossing to set the tray on the couch beside me. A bowl of soup and some brown, healthy-looking bread that is obviously homemade grace the tray. After a second, she perches on the very edge of the couch and leans towards me. “What’s it like?” she whispers urgently.

  “What?”

  “Sometimes we go to town for supplies, and I’ve been to Fayetteville, which is pretty big. But I’ve never lived anywhere else, especially not out there…”

  “Out where?”

  Before she can answer, a voice calls up the stairs, startlingly close. “Elidi? What’s taking so long?”

  Elidi jumps to her feet and scampers for the door.

  “Wait,” I call.

  She hesitates, her hand on the loose knob.

  I don’t know what to say to make her stay. “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “Out back,” she says with a nervous laugh. “I’ll get you a chamber pot for at night. Mother says you shouldn’t go outside then. There’s snakes and…stuff.”

  Leaving me with that lovely image, she slips out and closes the door. Her mother—our mother—repeats the question. I wait for Elidi to make some excuse, but she doesn’t.

  “She wanted to know if I knew about her,” my sister says.

  “I told you not to talk to her,” Mother says in a low voice, but not so low that I can’t hear her.

  “Should I just ignore her when she talks to me?”

  “She didn’t grow up like you girls,” Mother says, raising her voice now, as if speaking directly up the stairs for my benefit. “She’s not one of us, and she never will be.”

  I push the tray away. I’m not going to eat her food if she hates me that much. She probably poisoned it.

  My stomach growls again.

  To distract myself, I push aside some of the old junk and make my way to the end of the room, where the window looks out over the side yard. In the back, I can see a little grey shed that looks like a wooden Port-a-Potty. Someone has got to be freaking kidding. It’s an outhouse. Without thinking, I scramble back to my bag and pull out my phone. I have to share this with Emmy. It’s just too good—too bad—not to share.

  No service. And my phone is about to die, because while I slept, it searched for signal. I plug it in, just in case. Maybe on a winter day, when the trees are bare, a signal can get through. I don’t know enough about trees to know if they block phone signals. Dad was the botany professor. We had one tree in our yard—a cottonwood that would shed so much cotton in the fall that it looked like snow. In Oklahoma, we didn’t get much snow. I wonder if it snows here in Arkansas.

  I return to the window. The glass is streaked with white, but when I scratch at it, I find that it’s some kind of stain. I scratch little streaks of black and brown stuff off the pane for a while, thinking about what my mother said. Maybe I am spoiled and lazy, because when I look at the mountain of trash in the room, all I want to do is cry. Or go back to sleep. Or do anything other than clean up this mess I didn’t make.

  I’m about to turn away when a movement beyond the outhouse, in the trees, catches my eye. Zora is standing in the woods, breaking up sticks and dropping them into a box. Behind her, a tree branch is slowly creeping down, closer and closer. It moves more like a snake than a tree, stalking with deliberate intention. I yank at the window, but it won’t come open. Pounding on the glass, I yell to warn her, but she can’t hear me.

  The branch snakes around her neck.

  5

  My hand flies to my mouth, holding back a scream. Zora twists away, lunging for something on the ground beside her box of kindling. She comes up with a machete. With one swift blow, she hacks off a bundle of yellowing leaves and twigs, and the branch snaps back into place, far above her, as if nothing happened. My heart hammers in my chest, but Zora simply drops the machete and goes back to collecting kindling, as unfazed as the tree itself.

  I’m losing my mind. This is weirder than the blackout hallucinations I had as a kid. Now I’m seeing things in broad daylight. Wolves, cougars, murderous trees. I’m still sitting on the floor trying to catch my breath when my mother arrives with a chamber pot. It’s a white kettle with a lid. She tells me to pee in it. I tell her I’d rather die.

  “I know this is hard,” she says, sinking onto the couch.

  I join her, rethinking my decision to despise her. Just because she’s not Dad doesn’
t mean she’s an evil witch. And she might have answers to the questions whirling through my mind. “What is with this place?” I ask. “I just saw a tree attack my sister.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she snaps. “Just because you’ve never seen a forest before doesn’t mean it’s out to get you.” Her boots are gone, and her big toe peeks out a hole in the end of her wool sock. She sighs and rubs her forehead. “I know you just went through a hard time, and you still miss your father. This isn’t what you’re used to, but if you’re willing to adjust, it will happen. Just be flexible. We’ll give you the time you need to mourn.” She reaches out and pats my shoulder awkwardly, like she’s never touched a human before. I can’t imagine her holding my sisters when they had nightmares, or hugging them when they fell down and scraped their knees, or just when they went off to school in the mornings.

  “What about school?” I ask, turning to her. “When do I have to go back?”

  “We all homeschool. You’ll have to go in to Kingston, that’s the nearest school, for a test once a year. I’ll bring you some books, and we’ll send your work in with your sisters’.”

  I try to hide my desperation. “What about the kids in the other cabins, the ones I saw today? They’re all homeschooled?”

  “Every one of them,” Mother says, patting my knee this time. Pat, pat, pat. “Don’t worry, Stella, we’ll take care of everything.”

  With that, she takes my tray, sets down a huge Mason jar full of water, and leaves me alone again. Tears prick at my eyes. Something about her kindness is harder to take than her cruelty. But at least she’s being understanding. It would be worse if she made me go out and meet everyone, or go to a new school right away. I can’t act normal right now.

  To be fair, she didn’t know I was coming. Maybe she had to give me up in the divorce. She got one twin and Dad got the other. I’m glad I didn’t live here all my life, that my dad wasn’t alone all these years. It must be a shock for her, to suddenly have another daughter, one she doesn’t have room for. And if I get the room cleaned up, she’ll be proud of me, the way Dad was when I set my mind to a big project and followed through all the way to the end.